Physics Commons^™

Thermal Property Measurement Of Thin Fibers By Complementary Methods, Troy Robert Munro

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Thin fibers are prevalent in many engineering materials. Measuring how well heat transfers in such small fibers can be difficult to determine, and previous methods have led to erroneous results. This dissertation details three proposed methods to improve the measurement of the thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and volumetric heat capacity of thin fibers. Of particular interest is natural and synthetic spider silks because previously published values of the natural silk thermal conductivity was similar to copper, an excellent thermal conductor.

The three methods developed are the improved transient electrothermal technique (which was redeveloped to include radiation and convection heat losses …

Fluorescence Quenching At High Quencher Concentrations, David Peak, T C. Werner, R M. Dennin Jr., J K. Baird

All Physics Faculty Publications

Chemical reactions occurring in dense media at high reactant concentrations can be described by rate ‘‘constants’’ which are actually functions of concentration. We present a theoretical model in which this so‐called rate constant ‘‘renormalization’’ occurs for the specific case of fluorescence quenching in solution. We show that both the quenching and the excitation rate constants can become concentration dependent. We fit our theory to several sets of experimental data—our own and some from the literature—and show that excellent agreement is obtained by varying a single free parameter, namely, the efficiency with which a fluorophore‐quencher collision leads to a quench of …